AI agents speed banks’ response to regulatory change

A webinar hosted by Workday examined how AI agents can help financial institutions respond to regulatory change. Participants included Patrick O’Donoghue, regional sales director at Workday; Daniel Pridham, principal enterprise architect at Workday; and moderator Jane Cooper. The panel described agents that automatically gather contracts, supplier records, financial and HR data and reduce the manual work that can slow compliance teams.

Panelists outlined the sequence of tasks a regulatory update typically generates: determine which contracts are affected, identify suppliers or customers that need review, update processes and controls, collect data required for new reporting, and estimate costs and workforce implications. They identified the primary obstacle as the time and effort required to locate information across systems and coordinate work across finance, procurement, legal, HR, operations and IT.

Presenters explained agents can assemble business context such as contract terms, supplier lists, transaction and reporting data, organizational charts, policies and process histories so specialists can focus on judgment and decisions. Agents can search multiple repositories, extract key clauses and data points, and present structured summaries to relevant teams, reducing the manual effort of pulling documents and reconciling data.

Discussion on integration focused on practical workflows rather than replacing staff. Agents were described as tools to detect regulatory announcements, map obligations to internal records, flag affected items, create task lists, notify stakeholders, feed updated datasets into reporting pipelines and provide audit trails for regulator reviews.

Key stakeholders identified were compliance officers, legal counsel, finance heads, procurement and vendor managers, HR, IT operations and senior leadership. Each function requires different views from an agent: procurement needs supplier exposure details, finance needs adjusted reporting figures and HR needs workforce impact assessments. The panel highlighted the need for cross-functional governance and clear ownership of follow-up tasks.

Panelists outlined a full value chain in practice: automated detection of a regulatory announcement; rapid mapping to contract clauses and data sources; identification and prioritization of affected contracts, suppliers and customers; allocation of work to specialist teams; updates to processes and reporting systems; and ongoing monitoring to confirm compliance. Panelists stated such end-to-end workflows shorten the time from rule issuance to compliance and reduce the risk of reactive, fragmented responses.